Accentual
meter is the simplest, oldest, and most natural poetic measure
in English. Its origins date back to the beginnings of our
language. In one form or another it has been a constant presence
in English poetry from Beowulf and Piers Plowman
to the present. Perennially popular, it is the meter of most
nursery rhymes and playground chants as well as many folk
ballads. Even today stress meter provides the underlying structure
for such forms as rap and cowboy poetry.

The
traditional prosody of a language always selects phonetic
features immediately audible to native speakerssuch
as pitch, quantity, syllable counts, accent, assonance, alliterationand
arranges one or more of them in expressive patterns. Compared
to most other languages, English is very strongly stressed.
Speech stress in English conveys meaning. The more meaningful
a word the stronger speech stress it receives. It was, therefore,
almost inevitable that stress would provide the basis for
most English metersfirst in purely accentual form then
in later accentual-syllabic developments.

The
basic principles of accentual verse are stunningly simple.
There is, in fact, only one steadfast rule: there must be
an identical number of strong stresses in each line. (If the
poem is stanzaic in structure like a ballad, then there must
be the same number of strong stresses in each line of the
stanza.) All other rules of stress meter are only qualifications
of this single principle. Stress verse does not require any
set number of syllables per line or any set arrangement between
stressed and unstressed syllables. Accentual verse demands
only an audible and regular number of natural speech stresses
per line. The direct and simple nature of accentual verse
explains its central importance for oral poetry. Even a child
can master the meter without recourse to pen and paper. No
wonder most nursery rhymes are written in accentual measures.
Nursery rhymes can have between one and seven stresses per
line, but the most popular formand indeed the most common
measure for all English accentual verseis the four-beat
line with a medial caesura.

Although
every line in this famous folk charm has a different syllable
count, the meter is constantfour strong beats per line.

Prosodists,
like all literary theorists, adore complexity, and they are
liable to make distinctions where meaningful differences do
not exist. Consequently, they have often been flummoxed and
outwitted by the simple country sense of strong stress meter.
Frequently they try to analyze accentual verse in terms of
metrical feet, but the concept of the foot, which is derived
from Greek and Latin verse, has no relevance to this Germanic
form. The structural unit of accentual verse is the line or
half-line. Dividing accentual verse into metrical feet can
be done (just as it can be done to prose), but it reveals
nothing essential about the generative principles of the form.
Let's analyze the same nursery rhyme in the conventional accentual-syllabic
manner.

..
. . .
. . .  . . .Star
| light | Star | bright,

..
. . .
. U. . 
. .U
.
First | star | I see | tonight

U.
.  . .U
.
..U
..
.U
.
I wish | I may | I wish | I might


. . .U
. .
. . .U
. ..
.U
.
Have the | wish I | wish to | night

This
analysis would suggest that the poem is metrically incoherent.
In accentual-syllabic terms, the meter seems to change in
every line. By seeking too much metrical organization, an
accentual-syllabic scansion misconstrues what is there. Yet
the English-speaking ear immediately hears the underlying
and unifying form, which is created by stress alone without
regard to syllables.

Anglo-Saxon
poets added two important acoustic elements to the basic rule
of accentual versealliteration and the medial pause.
They heightened the central sonic effect of their basic meter,
the four beat lines, by pausing slightly midway and alliterating
three of the four stressed syllables. One significant and
often overlooked purpose of meter is to stylize poetic speech
in a way that immediately differentiates it from ordinary
speech. Such stylization is essential to oral poetry since
meter must endow what is being said with the special status
of art. Anglo-Saxon verse used alliterative stress to accomplish
this stylization. In The Age of Anxiety (1947), a long
poem written in the Anglo-Saxon measure, W. H. Auden demonstrates
how even a wartime radio newscast can be transformed into
poetry:

Auden's
example also illustrates the three standard variations of
\ alliterative verse. First, he substitutes two paired alliterations
(as in "Five \ \ \ cities. Fires started.") for the usual
triple alliteration per line. Second, \ \ \ Auden's alliterations
in "Pressure applied by pincer movement" demonstrate that
alliteration does not necessarily fall on the first syllable
of a word but rather the first strongly stressed syllable.
Finally, even the ambiguous alliterations of line five (in
which beach perhaps alliterates with charm)
reminds one that Anglo-Saxon poets sometimes included only
two alliterations per lineone on each side of the caesura.

Anglo-Saxon
poets sometimes added other elements. There often were pervasive
syllabic and quantitative elements in Old English verse. (Anglo-Saxon
poets especially loved to arrange the second half of the line
in particular shapes.) Those features, however, have not been
adopted by modern poets using alliterative stress meter. Contemporary
poets have generally followed only three basic rules:

There
should be four strong stresses per line.

The
line should have an audible medial pause or caesura with
two strong stresses on each side.

Three
of the four strong stresses should alliterate (or there
should be two pairs of alliterated stressed syllables).

In
all accentual verse there is also an implied fourth ruleavoid
metrical ambiguity by reducing or eliminating secondary stresses
that might confuse where the beat falls. The passage from
Age of Anxiety shows how extreme this reduction of
secondary stresses can be; Auden has eliminated almost all
possibly ambiguous secondary stresses. (He also avoids letting
the lines consistently fall into any regular accentual-syllabic
rhythms though any individual line might be entirely iambic,
trochaic, anapestic, or dactyllic.)

English
accentual poetry grew out of the oral tradition of pre-Christian
Teutonic tribes, and the metrical practice was strikingly
homogeneous from Germany and Scandinavia to Iceland and Britain.
Accentual alliterative verse was the dominant English form
until the Norman invasion, and it maintained a strong hold
on native speakers for centuries afterwards. In some sense
accentual verse still represents the core Germanic rhythm
of basic English as opposed to the more cosmopolitan hybrid
of French, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon that characterizes modern
English. Only after the principles of accentual-syllabic verse
were codified in the Elizabethan age did literary poets mostly
abandon the purely accentual system. A great split then occurred
in English-language poetry. For the next three hundred years
literary poets worked almost exclusively in accentual-syllabic
meters while accentual meters survived in popular oral poetry.

Most
of this oral poetry has been lost. Only what was transcribed
into writing (and perhaps thereby changed) has been preserved.
The greatest single source of this popular oral poetry is
probably Mother Goose's Melody (c.1765). This volume,
which goes unmentioned in many standard histories of English
poetry, remains an indispensable classic of the language.
The appearance of this rambunctious volume at the height of
the Augustan age also demonstrates how the oral tradition
preserved the older accentual meters that literary poets had
discarded. Even today accentual verse survives in verse composed
for oral presentation like cowboy poetry and rap. It remains
a natural medium for spoken verse.

Accentual
meter has proved influential among modern poets. In both its
basic and alliterative forms, it provided innovative writers
with a potent, audible measure that was immediately distinct
from the traditional accent-syllabic meters that had dominated
literary poetry since Sir Philip Sidney. Syllabic meters offered
a similar novelty, but they could not be easily heard in English.
Accentual measures gave poets auditory patterns that could
easily capture speech rhythms without sounding conventionally
literary. Coleridge, Tennyson, Longfellow, Dickinson, Kipling,
Hardy, and others employed stress-verse on occasion, though
almost never with alliteration, but the great nineteenth century
pioneer was Gerard Manley Hopkins. While his personal practice
of "sprung verse" proved too idiosyncratic to serve
as a general paradigm, his work suggested the broad artistic
possibilities of the method. Modern poets who have commonly
employed accentual verse include William Butler Yeats, W.
H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Edith Sitwell, Theodore
Roethke, Charles Causley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Donald Justice.
A few have revived the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line, but
most have preferred the basic measure. Among contemporary
poets three-beat and four-beat lines remain the most common
measures, although longer and shorter lines sometimes appear.
Used with skill and imagination, accentual verse sounds perpetually
fresh.

If
wishes were horses
Beggars would ride;
If turnips were watches
I would wear one by my side.

Rudyard
Kipling
Harp Song of the Dane Women
(1913)

What
is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She
has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She
has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet,
when the signs of summer thicken,And
the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,Yearly
you turn from our side, and sicken

Sicken
again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You
forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then
you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah,
what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

David
MasonSong of the Powers
1996

Mine,
said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
Stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.

Mine,
said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them, flown
from the mind of the shaper.

Mine,
said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper's
ethereal lives;
nothing's so proper
as tattering wishes.

As
stone crushes scissors,
as paper snuffs stone
and scissors cut paper,
all end alone.
So heap up your paper
and scissor your wishes
and uproot the stone
from the top of the hill.
They all end alone
as you will, you will.